Demanding AI

Monday, October 14, 2024

Demanding AI

The AI revolution is now fully underway, and its biggest threat to us isn’t that we all go blind from excessive eye-rolling because every other day appears to bring indefensible hype. Its biggest threat to us is that it will gobble up all the electricity we produce and collapse the electric grid.

This sounds exaggerated when you say it, but it appears quite real. Artificial intelligence computing is just the latest in the long trend of a contained digital boom fueling our economy. We aren’t inclined to think about this very much, since the booming use of computing services has been growing so quickly for so long, we don’t tend to think of it as growing at all. We’re so accustomed to the steady rate of acceleration that we think of it as standing still.

The growth in demand for artificial intelligence is only significant inasmuch as that the AI is just the latest feature of that growth. It may underwhelm us with its promise, considering how the hype appears to outrun the observed abilities. But it accounts for a burgeoning share of an expanding part of our economy—the part that’s expanding on its own.

Enter into the picture once again Mark P. Mills, one of this blog’s gurus in things relating to industrial production. Mark participated in the “Charles Mizrahi Show” podcast back in August, not long after he had been called to provide expert testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. The podcast discussion covered a lot of intriguing projections about what the AI boom will mean for our national electricity demand, among other policy choices.

One significant point is that AI is not only in high demand right now, but it is in itself an energy hog among energy hogs: The supercomputers in our pockets have given us the ability to tap into information systems everywhere and always, and this in itself has meant that internet service providers have been building computing/data centers at a breakneck pace. The large-language models lead us to believe they are thinking quickly, effortlessly generating impromptu streams of text—sometimes with voice and imagery. But the actual computing for what they are doing is far away from us on the global internet at the computing centers we euphemistically think of as The Cloud.

Real clouds aren’t as big and heavy as these sites—although atmospheric physics tells us that clouds have a lot to do with our planet’s climate system and the incomprehensible quantities of energy involved. The analogy may thus be quite apt: we don’t think of the insatiable demand for electricity far away from us when we’re tapping into the internet for “dumb” web pages from web servers—much less when they’re generating language by running AI algorithms performing billions of floating point operations per second—cutely described by the billowy term “teraflop”.

As has been discussed here before: the fashionable beliefs about what humans should be doing regarding material resources are at odds with what humans appear to want to do with material resources. We express our collective desires through our national politics, and the idea that just about every human activity is too destructive of our earth and its natural environment to be permitted stands in stark contrast with what we collectively reveal about our preferences at an individual level based on behavior. Individually we want to live in buildings with climate-controlled comfort, to go where when want when we want by driving two-to-three-ton personal vehicles around the place, and we want all the communications with our fellows across the globe at the drop of a hat—even in the form of digital stand-ins for live people, including streaming services, social media, and talking AI bots like ChatGPT.

Artificial intelligence is, as Mark says, at its earliest stages now—he reckons perhaps akin to where computing was in 1984 when Apple introduced the McIntosh with its innovative graphical user interface. With each incremental improvement in devices, computing power has actually grown exponentially. The quantities of data handled by today’s smartphone on the device would once have consumed the electricity it takes to power something like a skyscraper 40 years ago. Some of the offloaded cloud computing behind the magic is handled in a data center at a greenfield location that chugs the electric equivalent of a jumbo jet’s engine output nonstop. And that electric supply has to be uninterrupted, too, as we should know from experience: the effects of a mini power outage require our electronic devices to reboot and get back up to full capacity before we can figure out where we were and what we were doing.

In other economic activity, there are plateaus. We reach a certain level of consumption and then our demand is sated. With cars and driving, there’s a point where people have had enough and don’t want to spend any more time commuting. It’s true for travel in general also—or even more obviously for food and other consumption goods: Eventually we’re done consuming; the activities have taken up enough of our lifespan. But this isn’t so for computing. Computing promises too much in the way of economic growth and opportunity. And by implication, it will require ever greater amounts of electricity to pursue it. As Mills says, human curiosity is limitless. Computing power is consumed as soon as it increases because our species is constantly trying to improve and expand technology, ability, and knowledge.

All the popular talk about Net Zero and alternatives to old-fashioned energy sources is unrealistic. If we impose it politically, it will reduce our general economic wealth. The Europeans, led by Germany, are implementing energy austerity in the name of saving the planet, but they have instead managed to outsource economic production and growth to China, which is not afraid of increasing the amount of electricity available, and keeping its costs down. Europeans can feel good about their low-growth economic performance and how they’ve avoided carbon dioxide emissions. But they should admit that they’ve caused China to add to carbon dioxide at a faster rate than what the Europeans gave up.

If we want to continue to grow the economy and to encourage a growing population, we will need to increase the production and consumption of energy—or wind up with a dissatisfied electorate willing to put the kooks back in charge as an expression of frustration.